Prospects for a reliable pool of comments about the performance of law firms

We are in the midst of another broad-scale effort to compile law department evaluations of law firms. This time the Association of Corporate Counsel leads the charge, and claims early in the battle to have lots of cavalry behind it. I have my doubts about the war’s success, but I support the effort.

A long trail of posts here discuss what may be a mirage of collective evaluations by law departments of their law firms (See my post of July 21, 2005: Zagat-style ratings for law firms; April 6, 2007: risks of crowd-hacking on evaluation systems; May 14, 2006: collective, confidential assessments; Nov. 19, 2007: shared ratings of firms; March 20, 2009: benefits to general counsel of pooled ratings of firms; Jan. 25, 2008: Martindale-Hubble and shared assessments; May 12, 2009: pooled evaluations; June 9, 2009: further thoughts on ratings of firms contributed by law departments; Aug. 5, 2009: favorable byproduct of convergence; and Aug. 13, 2009 #3: Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem.).